EU renegotiation: chasing windmills in Birmingham

Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them.

Perhaps Cameron will not employ the very words used by Miguel de Cervantes (some on the nationalist right of his party will probably take issue with the quotation of foreign writers) but, if recent statements are anything to go by, that will be the sentiment expressed when talking about Europe. The PM is picking a whole host of fights with the EU, in most cases against everyone’s advice, just to satisfy his Europhobic backbenchers.

From the EU budget to justice and home affairs, from fiscal union to banking union the debate is framed in terms of threats rather than opportunities. In fact, the only time the word opportunity is utilised is when talking about using the process of reform in the EU as an opportunity to remove Britain from more and more chapters of European cooperation.

That’s where the illusion starts. This nebulous concept of renegotiating Britain’s membership of the EU is the biggest red herring in the North Sea. It is used to appease those at the right and extreme right who want full withdrawal from the EU. But it is doomed to fail on all counts.

On the one hand no “renegotiation” will ever be enough for those that want to see Britain abandon the EU. The more meat the PM throws at them the more he wets their blood-thirsty appetite. In fact, in this futile effort to appease them, the PM has been compromising the national interest. The December 2011 “veto” locked the UK out of the room where important decisions about the EU’s future are taken. And the mooted opt out for justice and home affairs measures has been criticised by the police and all those involved in the nation’s security as a massive mistake that will make the fight against terrorism, illegal immigration and organised crime even harder.

On the other hand, such “renegotiation” will not be accepted by Britain’s European partners. The Polish Foreign Minister, a Conservative himself, from a country which has traditionally been considered the UK’s ally, came all the way to Oxford to say as much (£). He expressed an exasperation echoed by most EU member states with the UK’s attitude when in Brussels. The perception among our EU partners is that there seems to be more interest in grandstanding for domestic political consumption than constructively engaging to address the challenges the EU as a whole is facing. Germany, which has always been keen to keep Britain at the core of the EU, is now changing tune, with MPs from both the ruling centre right CDU and the centre-left SPD currently in opposition, saying that there is very little will to accommodate Britain’s demands for a “renegotiation”, exactly because of the spoiled child attitude displayed by the PM at European Council meetings since he came in power.

But good will aside, Britain’s hand if such a renegotiation is ever to take place will be weakened by its relative size and trading relationship with the rest of the EU. Whereas about 50 per cent of our trade is done with our EU partners, only 10 per cent of their trade is done with Britain. You do the maths.

Furthermore, why would other EU member states allow Britain to excuse itself from Single Market rules but continue ripping the benefits of Single Market membership? What is to stop others from making similar requests for exemption from areas the UK considers important? Even if the political will was there, even if Britain had the diplomatic and commercial capital to invest in such renegotiation, any concessions would imply the start of the Single Market’s unravelling, which would cost British business and households dearly.

Not to mention that it sends the wrong message; the more the UK isolates itself, the more it tries to remove itself from areas of European co-operation, the less likely it is to be able to gain support to advance areas that are of interest to us.

So instead of picking pointless battles with imaginary enemies, instead of creating impossible to fulfil expectations, the PM and his Ministers should use the EU’s decision-making structures to build alliances with Britain’s EU partners. Rather than threatening opt-outs and vetoes, the best way for Britain to address the areas of Single Market law it wants renewed is to engage constructively with others in the Council of Minister in reviewing EU laws, improving them when necessary and removing them if they have achieved their objective or have reached their sell-by date.

Don Quixote was told by his humble servant Sancho, "Now look, your grace, what you see over there aren't giants, but windmills, and what seems to be arms are just their sails, that go around in the wind and turn the millstone." The hope is that someone will awake the PM and his Europhobic backbenchers to exactly the same fact.

Hannan Fodder: This week, Daniel Hannan gets his excuses in early

Since Daniel Hannan, a formerly obscure MEP, has emerged as the anointed intellectual of the Brexit elite, The Staggers is charting his ascendancy...

When I started this column, there were some nay-sayers talking Britain down by doubting that I was seriously going to write about Daniel Hannan every week. Surely no one could be that obsessed with the activities of one obscure MEP? And surely no politician could say enough ludicrous things to be worthy of such an obsession?

They were wrong, on both counts. Daniel and I are as one on this: Leave and Remain, working hand in glove to deliver on our shared national mission. There’s a lesson there for my fellow Remoaners, I’m sure.

Anyway. It’s week three, and just as I was worrying what I might write this week, Dan has ridden to the rescue by writing not one but two columns making the same argument – using, indeed, many of the exact same phrases (“not a club, but a protection racket”). Like all the most effective political campaigns, Dan has a message of the week.

First up, on Monday, there was this headline, in the conservative American journal, the Washington Examiner:

“We will get a good deal – because rational self-interest will overcome the Eurocrats’ fury”

The message of the two columns is straightforward: cooler heads will prevail. Britain wants an amicable separation. The EU needs Britain’s military strength and budget contributions, and both sides want to keep the single market intact.

The Con Home piece makes the further argument that it’s only the Eurocrats who want to be hardline about this. National governments – who have to answer to actual electorates – will be more willing to negotiate.

And so, for all the bluster now, Theresa May and Donald Tusk will be skipping through a meadow, arm in arm, before the year is out.

Before we go any further, I have a confession: I found myself nodding along with some of this. Yes, of course it’s in nobody’s interests to create unnecessary enmity between Britain and the continent. Of course no one will want to crash the economy. Of course.

I’ve been told by friends on the centre-right that Hannan has a compelling, faintly hypnotic quality when he speaks and, in retrospect, this brief moment of finding myself half-agreeing with him scares the living shit out of me. So from this point on, I’d like everyone to keep an eye on me in case I start going weird, and to give me a sharp whack round the back of the head if you ever catch me starting a tweet with the word, “Friends-”.

Anyway. Shortly after reading things, reality began to dawn for me in a way it apparently hasn’t for Daniel Hannan, and I began cataloguing the ways in which his argument is stupid.

Problem number one: Remarkably for a man who’s been in the European Parliament for nearly two decades, he’s misunderstood the EU. He notes that “deeper integration can be more like a religious dogma than a political creed”, but entirely misses the reason for this. For many Europeans, especially those from countries which didn’t have as much fun in the Second World War as Britain did, the EU, for all its myriad flaws, is something to which they feel an emotional attachment: not their country, but not something entirely separate from it either.

Consequently, it’s neither a club, nor a “protection racket”: it’s more akin to a family. A rational and sensible Brexit will be difficult for the exact same reasons that so few divorcing couples rationally agree not to bother wasting money on lawyers: because the very act of leaving feels like a betrayal.

Problem number two: even if everyone was to negotiate purely in terms of rational interest, our interests are not the same. The over-riding goal of German policy for decades has been to hold the EU together, even if that creates other problems. (Exhibit A: Greece.) So there’s at least a chance that the German leadership will genuinely see deterring more departures as more important than mutual prosperity or a good relationship with Britain.

And France, whose presidential candidates are lining up to give Britain a kicking, is mysteriously not mentioned anywhere in either of Daniel’s columns, presumably because doing so would undermine his argument.

So – the list of priorities Hannan describes may look rational from a British perspective. Unfortunately, though, the people on the other side of the negotiating table won’t have a British perspective.

Problem number three is this line from the Con Home piece:

“Might it truly be more interested in deterring states from leaving than in promoting the welfare of its peoples? If so, there surely can be no further doubt that we were right to opt out.”

I could go on, about how there’s no reason to think that Daniel’s relatively gentle vision of Brexit is shared by Nigel Farage, UKIP, or a significant number of those who voted Leave. Or about the polls which show that, far from the EU’s response to the referendum pushing more European nations towards the door, support for the union has actually spiked since the referendum – that Britain has become not a beacon of hope but a cautionary tale.

But I’m running out of words, and there’ll be other chances to explore such things. So instead I’m going to end on this:

Hannan’s argument – that only an irrational Europe would not deliver a good Brexit – is remarkably, parodically self-serving. It allows him to believe that, if Brexit goes horribly wrong, well, it must all be the fault of those inflexible Eurocrats, mustn’t it? It can’t possibly be because Brexit was a bad idea in the first place, or because liberal Leavers used nasty, populist ones to achieve their goals.

Read today, there are elements of Hannan’s columns that are compelling, even persuasive. From the perspective of 2020, I fear, they might simply read like one long explanation of why nothing that has happened since will have been his fault.

Jonn Elledge is the editor of the New Statesman's sister site CityMetric. He is on Twitter, far too much, as @JonnElledge.